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Review

Safia Siad is a curator, DJ, and arts programmer currently residing in Tkaronto.

The Prairies are my home. The Prairies are not my home. I am from the Prairies. I am not from the Prairies. It has always been like this. Although I, a Black woman of varied origins, have spent a significant portion of my life living in Alberta, my relation to the Canadian Prairies has been complicated and fraught. _The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology_, edited by Karina Vernon, was an illuminating, affirming, enraging, revelatory, exciting, and daunting read. Thoroughly dense, this 580-page anthology serves as a mere introduction to the myriad of Black lives in the Prairies. We are here. We have been here. We have histories here. We have futures here.

Through a comprehensive introduction, Vernon lays the groundwork for a “recovered \[B\]lack archive”; many of the pieces and excerpts were published for the first time in this anthology, an incredibly important detail underscoring the reality that the Canadian literary and publishing landscape historically has not made space for these voices. Vernon respects and brings attention to the specificity in handling Black oral histories and Black community building, emphasizing the care necessary not to replicate or reproduce colonial archival methods in preserving and sharing these stories. As she states, “A \[B\]lack archive is a network of social relations forged slowly and carefully, on the basis of trust.” This is not only an archive, but a living document of firsts.

Vernon’s introduction comes with the promise that “this is not the timeless, homogeneously unraced microcosm of the Canadian regional imaginary.” That pervasive and simply incorrect imaginary is precisely why taking in this anthology is like a cool refreshing drink of water, a shock to the system, life-giving and real. Vernon recalls thinking of herself and her family as anomalies in ’80s Alberta, rather than what they actually were, which were members of the third wave of Black migration to the Canadian Prairies from across the African diaspora. How many of us thought and felt that very same thing? Anomalies, exceptions, exceptional, the only ones, the very few.

Sharing the catalyst that began the whole editing process, Vernon recounts a chance encounter in the library stacks two months into her doctoral program with the English department at the University of Victoria. Drawn to a shelf containing writing on the region in Alberta where she had grown up, Vernon found a brief, matter-of-fact passing sentence written about a Black person in a travelogue from April 20, 1873, by William Francis Butler, proving that we have, in fact, been here all along: “one fine day a canoe came floating down the lonely river; it held a solitary negro—a pioneer, cook, trapper, vagrant, idler or squatter as chance suited him.” Having never seen anything like this in a historical document from that time myself, I can only imagine the weight of such a moment. “Reading this passage, I was stunned,” Vernon shares. “The image of a \[B\]lack paddler inside a canoe places \[B\]lackness inside the very icon of a particular kind of Canada, one that sentimentally links the nation to the wilderness and to the fantasy of white settler Indigeneity, but rarely, if ever, to \[B\]lackness.”

Vernon works “with an understanding of the prairies not as a natural geographic location, but as an ideological and ‘ideation space’” in which we exist, whole worlds fleshed out under expansive Prairie skies. In this anthology, we are introduced to 145 years of Black writing on the Prairies from 1872 to 2019 by Black settlers, migrants, and refugees. As I slowly take in their stories, I can’t help but think about how wildly different my formative years would have been if I had known that they existed, that all these people existed. I will forever be thinking about this gaping erasure.

Arranged chronologically by author birth date (where known), “The Repertoire” portion of the book includes the archival records and contributions of 61 Black Prairie dwellers across time. Throughout a multitude of verses, plays, and stories is the almost sci-fi feeling of belonging and unbelonging at once. Cheryl Foggo, journalist, screenwriter, poet, playwright, and writer, shares her memories growing up in Calgary, and has been lovingly unfolding, reframing, and sharing the story of legendary cowboy John Ware. In an excerpt from her recent play _John Ware Reimagined_ (staged in 2014 and 2017), Foggo’s “representation of John’s quietude, his many hurts, and Toronto-born Mildred \[Ware\]’s homesickness for urban life looks beyond the stereotype of John as a Paul Bunyan-like giant and Mildred as dutiful wife.” In “sum of the parts that can be named,” multidisciplinary artist Deanna Bowen details her meticulous and patient research of personal family histories, marked by and intertwined with Canada’s violent anti-Black histories. With “Djinn in Saskatchewan,” writer Nehal El-Hadi connects over here to over there, Prairie dust to desert dust. There are offerings by Esi Edugyan, Lawrence Hill, Tchitala Nyota Kamba, Kaie Kellough, Bola Opaleke, Marika Warner, Claire Harris, Roland (Rollie) Pemberton (Cadence Weapon), Dawn Carter, Nduka Otiono, and Ahmed Ali, among many others. I believe that this anthology should be required reading for all who live across the Prairies and beyond. This book is a portal. An opening to the many more stories to be told from our past, our present, and our futures.

Writer

Gather

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Race

Publishing

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology Edited by Karina Vernon  Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2020

April Thompson is a writer and curator currently based in Vancouver. Her practice is guided by critical investigations of photography and the moving image, spatial politics and new media.

##### “If light does come from within does that make us walking movie projectors? Are we casting form onto a dark screen?”  
—David Wojnarowicz, _Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration_, 1991

A mechanical heartbeat in heard in the gallery space, the methodical click-pause-click of a timed slide projector. A Super 8 video projection casts a slice of electric-blue light that spills from wall to floor. The monotone voice of the artist, David Wojnarowicz, is punctuating a film soundtrack of clumsy keyboard chords and canned, synthetic drumbeats. These immediate audiovisual signals are not overwhelming. Instead they draw you in, as if to forewarn, through a multitude of frequencies, that you are about to enter a space indexed by a depth of interior worlds.

_David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film_ 1978–1992, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, displayed over 100 works and was the first exhibition to focus solely on the artist’s photographic and filmic practice. Wojnarowicz’s output increased in both scope and quantity toward his death from AIDS\-related illness in 1992\. While he is known for his paintings, photo graphs, collages, and video collaborations, he is above all a writer. His 1991 collection of creative essays, _Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration_, documents the rage, grace, and futility of life in America, with an honesty that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. And while Wojnarowicz deftly experimented across different media, his unique handle on language stitched all these explorations together. 

In the artist’s collaboration with Marion Scemama, _When I Put My Hands on Your Body_ (1989), a roaming Super 8 camera gives a cropped view of two bodies touching, licking, and rubbing. An insatiable tongue caresses the body, matching the intensity of words uttered by Wojnarowicz: “it makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh between my hands in a time of so much loss.” The flesh of a naked male torso fills the majority of the screen but in the margins there is the implicit presence of society—the rigid denim jeans and belt buckle that block the tongue’s advance, daily life layered upon the self, a barrier to skin-on-skin contact. 

Wojnarowicz is known for working through themes of mortality in his work, and this probing is cast both inward and outward; there is self-portraiture alongside portraits of others. In _Untitled (Deathbed Portrait of Peter Hujar)_ (1989/2012), there are snapshots of Hujar’s resting face, eyelids slightly open and mouth ajar, of his hands with distressed fingernails and of the undersides of his feet—that vulnerable bedrock of the body so often grounded and unseen. The compositions are slightly askew or unbalanced by negative space, making the surrounding hospital room seem stark and momentous despite its reality as a generic and unremarkable setting. 

Other artists returned Wojnarowicz’s gaze: there are portraits of him by Andreas Sterzing, Peter Hujar, Ivan Dalla Tana and Scemama. In Krist Gruijthuijsen’s exhibition curation, this balance between the self and others, between seeing and _being_ seen, skilfully conveyed a duality: closeness of community (street life, being gay in New York City during the HIV/AIDS crisis) as well as the loneliness of selfhood (the artist’s solitude, and that of illness, and death). 

Numerous works featured objects, animals, and text, though the human body was keenly felt throughout the exhibition. Wojnarowicz is inscribed in each Super 8 video: the plastic, hand-held camera would have fit snugly in his large hand like a gun, his fist closed around the base and his finger poised on the trigger. With every step Wojnarowicz made there is a slight vibration on the image. Registering this exhibition also meant indelibly taking in the presence of other bodies around you. When walking underneath the scaffolding to view works, you heard footsteps on the overhead platform creaking as other viewers’ weights shifted. The exhibition put you in a relational zone with Wojnarowicz: an outsider looking in, observing the stories of other bodies, feeling the weight of your own body, and the sphere of your existence weaving through time and space with that of others. 

The HIV/AIDS crisis placed the body in particular relation to others. For decades, transmission was a dirty word used to stigmatize those living with the virus, and their community. Throughout Wojnarowicz’s work the idea of transmission is powerfully present, and radical. Here, “transmission” is a signal, meaning communication—a concept that propelled the artist’s use of language. Transmission is also a midpoint, a passageway between signal and reception, and in this there is liberation. Wojnarowicz once wrote of a road trip: “I’m getting closer to the coast and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me.” 

Alongside his search to document, remember, and understand through the visual, Wojnarowicz was aware of the insurmountable gap between life and image. It is the gap between representation and reality, between the transmission of a non-verbal moment through to the language that denotes it. This seems a space of freedom—where language and image break down—and it is present in all of Wojnarowicz’s work, an invisible interval between the dust particles illuminated by a projector’s beam, or in the blank pause of the rotating slide carousel. 

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April Thompson reviews _David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film 1978–1992_ (2020) at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver. The comprehensive exhibition was the first to focus solely on the artist’s photographic and filmic practice, and featured more than 100 works intersecting sexuality, intimacy, transmission, illness, and mortality. 

David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film 1978–1992 Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver Jan 10–April 5, 2020 

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